You’d Be Arrested if You Tried to Take These Airplane Photos Today

Like wearing shoes through security before Richard Reid’s failed airplane bombing, setting up a telephoto lens at the end of an airport runway wasn’t a big deal before 9/11. Photographer John Schabel did just that between 1994 and 1996 for his intriguing portrait series Passengers, which is only now being released as a book.

He staked out several airports and snapped away with a Nikon 35 mm film camera and a 500 mm reflex lens with a 2x teleconverter, giving him 1,000 mm of zoom. He says he was occasionally asked to leave, but usually had free reign as long as he was in a public space outside the airport.

“It was a different time and there was not the same kind of suspicion of cameras,” he says. “There wasn’t such a sensitively about the airport.”

At first Schabel attempted to shoot people in landing planes, but that proved impossible so he compromised by making pictures of passengers while the plane was still at the gate. His subjects weren’t actually flying, but he says many of them appeared to have transitioned into their flying mentality, which is really what he was after.

“I felt like they were on their way at that point, they were getting into that [flying] frame of mind,” he says.

While grainy and sometimes blurry, all the photos are scans of 8×10 prints he made in the darkroom. It took almost a decade for the photos to be published partly because Schabel was meticulous about putting it together. He and Jack Woody, the founder of Twin Palms, the book’s publisher, took their time to ensure the book turned out the way they wanted.

We’ve come across several other projects that use the windows of public transportation vehicles as portrait frames. Some of them like Michael Wolf’s Tokyo Compression project are more in-your-face and easier to read. But we like the distance in Schabel’s work because it allows for more audience interpretation.

“I think viewers can identify with those situations and then bring their own feelings to it,” he says.

Schabel won’t reveal the names of the airports where he shot because he likes the idea of placeless-ness and the way it relates to air travel. Just because you change planes at the O’Hare in Chicago doesn’t really mean you’re in Chicago. When you’re flying you’re not really anywhere. Without any geographic identifiers and without any captions, Schabel’s photos blend together the same way the fields blend together at 30,000 feet or the airport buildings blend together as passengers switch aircraft.

“I like that the photographs are so no-place,” he says.

Almost all the photos were shot at night because the light coming from the plane helped Schabel see the passengers better. And quite a few were shot during rainstorms because the rain often lead to delays, which meant he had more time to take pictures before the plane left the gate.

There’s a certain zen to the photos and that’s reflected in the layout of the book. It has almost no text and each photo has its own full page. Schabel says there’s no particular rhyme or reason to the ordering of the photos other than needing to fit together visually on the page.

“Sometimes you have to work really hard to keep things simple,” he says.

John Schabel will be signing copies of Passengers at the International Center of Photography on February 22nd, from 6:00pm-7:30pm